Esports fandoms in the United States have traditionally been considered masculine, white, and privileged spaces. In this article, we preliminarily explore how esports players who identify with historically marginalized identities describe memorable messages they have experienced when engaging with esports fandoms.
Video game cosplay is related to avatar creation as both have the capacity for gender exploration. Cosplay provides a safe space for trans people to explore their identity and find euphoria through gender experimentation via crossplay: dressing away from the cosplayer's usual gender presentation.
Memetic logics and participation play an increasingly important role in online communication and community-building. They have consequences for online fandom and the way fans create and circulate their works. Based on an ethnographic study of the Call of Duty fandom on TikTok from 2022 to 2023, we explore how the platform's affordances shape fannish expressions. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we are concerned with how memetic communication within fandom highlights interplay between human and nonhuman actors. The analysis demonstrates how creators must communicate with both algorithms and audiences on TikTok and how they need to take into account the platformization of bodies and the standardizing effects of video editing software in fannish endeavors.
[0.1] Abstract—Editorial for "Disability and Fandom," guest edited by Olivia Johnston Riley and Lauren Rouse, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 48 (June 15, 2026).
Editorial for "Gaming Fandom," guest edited by Hayley McCullough and Ashley P. Jones, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 47 (March 15, 2026).
Christopher A. Paul, Optimizing play: Why theorycrafting breaks games and how to fix it. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024, paperback, $35.00 (200pp) ISBN: 9780262547789; ebook, $25.99 (200pp) ISBN: 9780262378321.
Autistic representation in media is often restricted by stereotyped, negative portrayals of autistic traits. Autistic fans frequently create their own representation through methodical and creative interpretations of characters that were not originally intended to be autistic but who seem to experience the world in an autistic manner. Through an examination of the Star Trek franchise fandom, this "constructed representation" is demonstrated as an alternative way that disabled people find representation in a media landscape that so often excludes them.
Although autistic and otherwise neurodivergent fans are numerous, fan studies has devoted little attention to them as a group. Neuroqueer offers a means of addressing this absence. At the theoretical intersection of neurodiversity and queer theory, neuroqueer allows for an expansion of fan studies' work on gender and sexual diversity to incorporate neurological difference. In addition to being sexually and socially queer, fan practices show strong resonances with contemporary scholarship on neuroqueer rhetorics, cognitive styles, and ways of being in the world. This autoethnographic account of one autistic fan's engagement with fan fiction illustrates how these fan practices might be read as neuroqueer and how such a reading builds upon previous understandings of queerness in fandom.
Bo Ruberg, How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding Through Video Games, NYU Press, 2025, paperback, $30 (292p), ISBN 9781479832002; ebook $30, ISBN 9781479832033.
The mod A Dance with Rogues is located within a particularly infamous corner of the Neverwinter Nights fan community. Drawing on intertextual conversations between wider source texts, the mod can be encountered and understood as a playable piece of transmedial fan fiction.
I discuss the use of ableism to enable and promote transphobia. I focus on J. K. Rowling as a case study and demonstrate her rhetorical use of disabled people's accessibility needs to justify antitrans bigotry.
Fan communities of the television show What We Do in the Shadows (2019–24) read certain character traits as representing neurodivergence and share this reading through the creation of compilation videos. Highlighting two traits that are shown in the compilation videos and discussed by fans in the comment sections—stimming and echolalia—showcases the strength of neurodivergent fan communities.
Six long-established characters in the video game League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) have recently been queered by the game's producers pairing them in same-sex relationships. These relationships have been revealed or hinted at through official auxiliary material wherein the narrative of League of Legends exists. This strategy of queering characters through establishing same-sex relationships mirrors a practice rooted in fandom: slash fiction. Though fans and producers are using similar strategies to queer League of Legends, historically producers have had different motivations for creating queer content, often resulting in queerbaiting. However, the queering of Caitlyn and Vi points to the potential of the ability of strategies that mirror fan practices to bring queer resistance to mainstream media when used by producers.
As part of a broader project examining fan fiction inspired by The Elder Scrolls role-playing game (RPG) series, we explore how players' engagement with the games as media texts and the fictional game characters is reflected in fan texts. Our analysis of fan fiction and associated metadata published on the Archive of Our Own (AO3) highlights the notable prominence of original characters (OCs) in RPG-based fan fiction. Fan-created narratives often mirror the player character's journey through the game world and their interactions with nonplayer characters (NPCs), offering insight into how fans reinterpret and expand upon the source material.
Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be appearing in nearly every element of technological life, from virtual assistants to home appliances. As AI becomes more integrated into everyday life, its presence and impact are becoming difficult to ignore. The popularity of chatbots that rely on this technology is increasing, with some programs advertising themselves as a way to chat with your favorite characters. I explore the early impacts of this technology on three gaming fandoms and among users of two chatbot apps, drawing from online conversations to explore and theorize how engagement with AI is reshaping fandom, creating new cocreative fan fiction experiences, and presenting new obstacles for fans as they grapple with this new means of exploring fandom, narrative, and identity. While we think of video games as the ultimate media expression of agency, with players able to make choices and exert influence on environments, narratives, or other in-game outcomes, these stories exist with fewer of the bounds that game design imposes. Ultimately, the extensive agency that this interactive fan fiction offers fans has huge implications for the fandom experiences of video game players and beyond. It also has immense transformative potential, but the biases and potential negative impacts of AI have given many fans pause as more users flock to these apps.
Video game modifications (mods) are pastiches given that they copy the styles, images, and themes from games that have come before them. Fredric Jameson's particular conception of the pastiche is that it is a depthless kind of postmodern art, and he argues that all forms of art under late capitalism are commodified. However, mods are postmodern pastiches that extend Jameson's conception of art under a capitalist society because they are essentially noncommodities that contribute to the commercial success of the original game. Thus, despite being unmonetized, mods still work within the capitalist system of the contemporary gaming industry, with total-conversion mods (TCs) being a notable example. Fallout: London (2024), a TC for Fallout 4 (2015), provides an interesting case study because its release led to an uptick in sales for Fallout 4. In other words, a noncommodity directly drove sales for the commodity it is attached to. It is, thus, a manifestation of Julian Kücklich's precarious playbor. That said, the modders behind Fallout: London manage to subvert this exploitation because they opted to commercialize their playbor themselves, setting themselves apart from other modders.
I share the results of a 2022 survey done on Archive of Our Own users, specifically highlighting their disability identity. I discuss which disabilities are prevalent in fandom communities. Fan scholars can begin to form a foundational idea of fans' disability identities and their needs, wants, or desires about disability in fandom and its related media.
I examine fans' disability headcanons, or personal readings of a source text, on English-language Tumblr for Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's first novel, Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong (The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System). These posts show how fandom can allow for personal catharsis through shared identities, be a vehicle for explaining critical disability theory, and complicate our understanding of fans' relationship to the concept of canonical authority.
Female representation in games has been a popular subject of discussion among feminist theorists. The crucial element of these discussions is representation of the female body as a sexual object, which is usually supposed to fulfill the desires and needs of the male audience. I focus on queerness assigned by fan fiction authors to female characters in a popular gacha game, Genshin Impact, while offering an analysis of the sexual politics behind the design of these characters' bodies.
Fan studies as a field has rarely engaged with analog game players as fans, yet these communities clearly engage with game texts and participate in game-driven activities in ways that can be described as fannish. A clear example can be found in the creation of noncommercial, amateur expansions of analog games. We offer a survey of creator/fan interplay related to both board games and tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) and draw from this exploration to theorize a spectrum of creator/fan interplay, with intervals ranging from Simple Awareness to Inspirational Framework.
